Our Final Weeks...

We have really begun the countdown to our departure from Ghana now with just a little over 4 weeks left. I cannot believe nearly 3 months have gone by since I stepped foot off that plane and entered Africa for the first time, yet here I am. Anxiety is starting to kick in as I realize there is still so much I want to do before I leave and that time with my new friends is now diminishing, as we all know we will not be able to see each other nearly as often in New York next semester. We are all very much looking forward to going home, but I also know that leaving Ghana will be very difficult since it has been the cause of enormous growth in all of us.

I apologize for not updating as often, but the internet connection has actually gotten worse and I have just not had many chances. So you may have to wait to hear about much of what I have left out until I get home, but for now I will just mention the more significant events that have taken place recently or will happen soon. Last weekend we threw a birthday party for one of our group with a plethora of food and dancing, which was a lot of fun and what I hope to do for my own birthday in a few weeks. Then on Sunday night a small group of us went to a new Italian restaurant for dinner called Leonardo da Vinci’s that had amazing service and delicious food (and not just because we miss Italian food). We received a complimentary starter of bruschetta and then all shared an octopus salad and caprese salad before our second course of many pastas. We split a dish of cannelloni with meat sauce, four cheese risotto, and gnocchi with shrimp and tomato sauce that just melted in your mouth. Plus they were constantly replacing our bread that we used for dipping in the sauces, so by the end we were all extremely full. We still managed to each down a cappuccino from a real Itaiian espresso machine, however, which was a wonderful ending to the weekend. I feel only slightly guilty that I spent a couple hours at an Italian restaurant while in Ghana, since I do not feel that I can completely immerse myself in the African culture at every moment of every day or I would go crazy.

Although our long weekend trips are over, we still have couple day trips this semester to some picturesque areas of the southern region of Ghana. This past weekend we took a day trip to Aburi Gardens, a botanical garden a couple hours outside of Accra that is beautiful. It was filled with exotic trees and plants native to Ghana, many of which are used to make herbs and spices that we learned about and got to experiment with. We smelled the bark of a tree where cinnamon comes from as well as the leaves used to make allspice, and then tasted the outside of a cocoa bean (the inside of which is used to make chocolate). After the tour we had the freedom of riding bikes around the park for an hour before eating lunch and heading out to a craft market where we bought some souvenirs. It was a very enjoyable day, and definitely not as exhausting as most of our other trips that required at least a day of travel.
This weekend I am going with one of my classes to a rural village a couple hours east of Accra where the professor grew up to witness the rural life of Ghana. I am very excited since I know it will be a unique experience.

The volunteering at the Autism center is going fairly well, by the way, though I am a little frustrated with the attitudes of some of the staff. Many of them are not very friendly to me unless they need me to do something and they will often ignore certain children that get violent and start running around uncontrollably. I have not been trained in how to deal with this behavior so I know that I cannot do anything to help control them, but I wish the staff members who obviously do this for a living would make more of an effort to teach these children that it is wrong to hurt themselves and others. Otherwise, I do enjoy having some of the children come up to me and just lightly touch me out of curiosity or give me a hug in affection, which makes my going there worth it in the end. I am not doing anything of great significance for the center, but I am spending some of my free time just sitting and coloring with these children that often do not receive any other love or affection from family or the rest of the community. It is rewarding enough to know that my time with them is appreciated.

Today is registration day for next semester, and everyone here is even more stressed than usual since we are unsure whether or not the internet will be working at the time we all need it. I am still finalizing what classes I want to take, but I am pretty sure they will all be for my major and minor, which are Anthropology and Psychology respectively. My choices for now are Anthropology of Language, Anthropology of Science, Medical Anthropology, and Cognitive Neuroscience, though I am trying to find a way to change one of the Anthropology classes to a Psychology class that fits in my schedule so I am not taking too many scientific classes. They all sound very interesting, though, so I will let you know once I have made my final decisions and am safely registered.